The top Palestinian diplomatic representative in the United Kingdom has issued an urgent public call for UK authorities to uphold recently announced policy commitments, following an investigation by Middle East Eye that exposed a forthcoming major London travel industry fair will host a promotional booth for an Israeli state agency directly linked to the construction of illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Scheduled to run 3 through 5 November, the annual World Travel Market (WTM) London, one of the global travel sector’s most high-profile trade gatherings, will operate an official Israeli national pavilion managed by the Israeli government’s tourism authority. MEE’s Thursday investigation found that this shared booth will house dozens of Israeli commercial firms and public organizations, including the iTravelJerusalem tourism initiative. Operated by the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA), iTravelJerusalem is designed to drive visitor traffic to Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, territory recognized under international law as occupied Palestinian land. The JDA, a statutory body jointly overseen by the Israeli national government and the Jerusalem municipal administration, leads a wide portfolio of urban development projects across the city, and has been a central driving force behind decades of illegal settlement construction and expansion across occupied Palestinian territories. Palestinian Ambassador to the UK Hussam Zomlot laid out the contradiction between the UK’s recent policy moves and the upcoming WTM event in a Thursday night post on X, noting that just one month prior, the UK government formally outlawed the promotion of illegal settlements and publicly pledged to impose punitive measures against any parties that profit from or support unauthorized Israeli settlement activity on occupied Palestinian land. Zomlot emphasized that the upcoming WTM platform would grant a public stage to Israeli entities complicit in actions that amount to ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities, and demanded that the UK government move beyond rhetorical commitments to enforce its new rules, ensuring all parties involved in illegal occupation and settlement activity face tangible, enforceable consequences. Senior Labour MP Sarah Champion echoed these concerns in a public statement, questioning how a London-based event could be permitted to promote an Israeli agency tied to illegal settlement construction in direct apparent violation of the recently announced UK ban. The UK government formalized its position last month, officially recognizing Israel’s long-running occupation of Palestinian territories as illegal and rolling out a sweeping set of sanctions targeting Israeli settlements. Beyond the JDA-linked iTravelJerusalem initiative, the Israeli WTM booth will also host representatives from Africa Israel Hotels, a subsidiary of the Africa Israel Group that has been implicated in multiple settlement development projects across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The development follows a prior incident earlier this year, when MEE revealed that a London-based event called the Great Israeli Real Estate Expo was advertising property in illegal Israeli settlements, prompting the UK Foreign Office to refer the matter to the national advertising regulator in June. However, a follow-up MEE investigation in August found that the Advertising Standards Authority had declined to open a formal investigation into the event. In a September address to parliament, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband condemned the 2024 real estate expo as a shameful event that took place just miles from the parliamentary estate, and pledged that the UK would take concrete action to ban all advertising of illegal Israeli settlements on British soil to ensure no such event could occur again. A 2025 official report from the European Union Representative Office for the West Bank and Gaza Strip further details the JDA’s controversial activities, including a planned initiative to evict 40 Palestinian families from the Umm Haroun compound in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood to make space for a 320-unit illegal settlement housing complex. The JDA also secured Israeli government approval in 2020 for a contentious Jerusalem cable car project that requires uprooting hundreds of ancient trees and displacing critical local water, sewage and telecommunications infrastructure. The project has moved forward despite widespread grassroots Palestinian opposition and the withdrawal of four international corporate partners, and remains actively promoted by Israeli tourism authorities. Israeli human rights NGO Emek Shaveh has condemned the cable car scheme, noting that it poses severe risks to vulnerable Palestinian communities and the historic, millennia-old cultural landscape of Jerusalem’s Old City basin, with the explicit core goal of entrenching settler control over the area to push Palestinian residents out of the historic core and erase the city’s longstanding Palestinian cultural identity. Additional JDA plans include a large new settlement housing development adjacent to the Palestinian residential community of Beit Safafa in East Jerusalem, as well as a controversial renovation project at the Mamilla Pool tourist site in the Old City that local heritage advocates warn will desecrate an ancient, centuries-old Palestinian Muslim cemetery. At the time of MEE’s publication, WTM event organizers had not responded to repeated requests for comment on the presence of the JDA-linked entities at the 2024 fair.
Palestinian ambassador urges action over London event advertising settlement-linked Israeli agency
